What has bereavement got to do with Christian spirituality?

A guest post from Joanna Collicutt
Over the years I’ve participated in many courses on Christian spirituality, either as a student or teacher, and I’ve never found them completely satisfactory. There are lots of reasons for that, mainly to do with the vague and variable definition of the subject area and piecemeal approaches to its study. The most successful experiences have been in courses devoted to one primary historical text or thinker. They feel coherent and substantial, grounded in the life and thought of a single individual. But the challenge is then to place all these different individuals in relation to each other and, secondly, to connect their insights with the concerns of people in today’s post-modern secular context.
This, of course, is what preachers try to do with the Bible all the time, but it’s not been a notable approach to later Christian writings. This is perhaps because, while most Christians believe that the different voices in the Bible are all ‘singing from the same hymn-sheet’, this does not apply in the same way to the vast body of writings in the history of Christianity over 2,000 years.
As I reflected on this a few years ago, I began to embrace the idea that there is a common hymn-sheet, and it’s about being a human being who is trying to relate to God. This basic common melody can get drowned out by local contextual issues, so that there seem to be scores of different versions of Christian spirituality, but I decided that it might be possible, and indeed desirable, to try and retrieve something of that common melody. For one thing, we would then hear harmony rather than cacophony; for another, it might be an important melody for us to hear.
In the end the melody that I retrieved or - more correctly - stumbled upon was that of human bereavement. Many, many spiritual practices (and therefore the texts that describe and reflect on them) seem to be devoted to bringing the believer closer to a God who, however we conceive of this, is ultimately inaccessible to us. We might say this can’t be true for the Christian because of the Incarnation; but, in a sense, that makes the issue more acute because Jesus of Nazareth is no longer with us in body. I’ve often reflected on how hard it must have been for those first disciples who lost Jesus twice. The work of Christ ‘solves’ the theological problem of the moral and metaphysical gulf between God and humanity but the subjective experiential gulf remains: ‘Oh for a closer walk with God’, wrote William Cowper. Two thousand years after it happened our appetites are whetted by the story of Jesus but in many respects we remain hungry. As James (the singer not the Apostle) sang, ‘If I hadn't seen such riches I could live with being poor.’
Though painful, this is not necessarily a bad thing because it leads us to seek out the God who came close to us in Jesus. In my new book So longeth my soul I explore the way that this seeking, driven by longing, connects quite closely with the way we seek to stay close those we have loved and lost. We are not alone in our seeking; the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, supports, encourages, and leads us into truth. But the journey shares many of the contours of the ordinary, common, human process of bereavement.
One obvious way this is expressed - part of the melody if you like – is through practices of lament. These are ubiquitous in the Bible and in Christian spiritual wrings and liturgical practices: We lament our sin, the way the world responded to Jesus, the pain he suffered, our inability to live up to his call. All of this, as it were, grounds and intensifies our relationship with him.
In my book I also consider eight other practices that are common in bereavement: attending to the body of the deceased; attaching ourselves to them in our imagination; returning to places and times we shared with them or that were special to them; facing the fact that they aren’t here; catching a glimpse of where they are now (in Jesus’ case, exalted at the right hand of the Father); finding them, as it were, close at hand after all; living up to their memory; remembering ourselves and keeping them always in mind. All of these are ways that we wait well for a reunion with the one(s) who are no longer physically present with us.
I suggest that Christian spiritual writers as far apart as, for example, the desert fathers and mothers, the Protestant Reformers , and John Henry Newman were going about the fundamental task of waiting well for the ultimate reunion with Christ and engaged in trying to help other to do the same. The book offers lots of examples of this in more than 80 readings from primary sources.
Of course, Christian spirituality isn’t all about bereavement. For a start, Jesus isn’t dead. But this is a point of entry that, I hope, can make some of the wisdom of the past accessible in a way that not only makes some sense of a complex field, but draws out empathy for the ‘great cloud of witnesses’ from the past, and can connect with our deepest human longings and vulnerabilities (rather than the sometimes contrived religious aspirations that form the currency of a lot of our churchy conversations).
Bereavement can isolate us, but more commonly it brings us closer together – people gather at funerals and a lot of hugging goes on. Stories are shared and we so often learn that there was more to the deceased than we had thought. Sharing our human longing for God with others and connecting it with our longing for our lost loved-ones takes seriously the fact that we are made in the image of God. It also draws us closer together across tribes that would otherwise be separated by geography, culture, and history.
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So Longeth My Soul: A Reader in Christian Spirituality is published now and available at a launch discount via our website.
After working for many years in the health service as a clinical psychologist and specialist neuropsychologist, Joanna Collicutt moved into the field of psychology of religion and was director of the MA programme at Heythrop College until 2010. She is now Lecturer in Psychology and Spirituality at Cuddesdon College, and Oxford Diocesan Advisor for Spiritual Care for Older People. She is the author of numerous titles, including The Psychology of Christian Character Formation.